CHANGE: Social-Psychoanalytic Perspectives Conference Announcement

The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) is hosting its 2013 Annual Conference at Rutgers University Continuing Education Center, New Brunswick, NJ from November 1-2, 2013.

This conference takes up the issue of change from a social-psychoanalytic perspective: change in our bodies, our minds, our ways of being, our forms of communication, our social structures, and our values.

We seek proposals that investigate what psychoanalysis—in both its theoretical and applied forms—can offer for a better understanding of the meanings, process, and effects of change. Please think broadly about these issues from your own discipline, and consider proposing interdisciplinary conversations that discuss these issues across disciplines, or that invite commentary from a different discipline. Consider, for example, the following:

The role of psychoanalysis in informing our understanding of:

Changing social structures and conventions
Change across the lifespan
Changes in literature and the arts Activist projects that promote change
Research that tracks or promotes change
Change as an ideology promoted by mass culture and capitalism
Technological change and its impact
Political change and its impact upon possibilities for personal change
Changing bodies, changing selves: health, age, and identity
Changing the law, changing the reality: legislation and social justice
Changing subjects: LGBTQ identifications
Change in the clinic: How values are placed or misplaced
Reflections on change in current culture:
In religion and religious structures
In film, media, and literature
In the classroom
In psychoanalysis as a theoretical and applied practice

This year I will be participating in two roundtable panels. One roundtable is entitled “Therapists in (Trans)ition: Reflections, Questions, Challenges and Complexities of Psychoanalytically-Informed Work with Trans-Identified and Gender Nonconforming Clients in the 21st Century”. The second roundtable we named “Swimming Against the Tide: Finding Footholds for Psychoanalytically-Informed Treatment in Non-Dynamic Institutional Spaces”. Finally, I will be presenting an individual paper entitled, “The Therapist’s Demand for Change and the Masochistic Core” in a paper session that has been named “Psychoanalysis and Therapeutic Change”